When young children of Color from minoritized communities read decodable readers mandated by their school districts, children approach reading the texts with the expectation that the texts will make sense. While decodable readers allow children to apply their knowledge of phonics skills in context to support their word recognition, they tend to…

Addressing beginning reading instruction in urban schools, this article proposes that a curriculum gap exists in many K-3 classrooms that operate under the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First. The authors make a case for the inclusion of systematic and sustained instruction in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing…

Examines how different types of word recognition instruction appeared to affect students with different early literacy foundations. Finds differences in instructional practices to be related to growth in reading. Identifies four classroom practices that seemed to have the greatest success with children entering first grade with minimal reading…

Describes Marie Clay's word boxes that help children attend to phonological and orthographic features of words, developing phonemic awareness and improving word recognition and spelling. Describes a study showing that the use of word boxes with several elementary school students with learning disabilities was effective for improving and…

Contains suggestions from six contributors, including the use of parents as an audience for beginning readers; outdoor activities to motivate readers; word order recognition exercise; a books-by-mail library service for rural students; using remedial students to read to younger children; and a language arts/social studies project. (FL)

Suggests that perceptual problems may account for the difficulty young children experience in recognizing words. (RB)

Explains six tasks which require comprehension of words and which can be used to teach beginning readers. (MKM)

Presents a seven-step technique for teaching primary school students to recognize function words. Describes a method for eliciting parent help in the task and offers suggestions for review and follow-up activities. (FL)

Suggests a variety of class activities using word banks. (MKM)

Reports a study of fourteen word lists and proposes a basic list of 240 starter words. (TO)

Surveys how children develop their powers of word identification, and questions common assumptions about the utility of sight words. (TO)

Suggests teaching a compare/contrast method of word identification rather than teaching syllabication rules to decode words and describes research investigating this technique. (MKM)